Jean Louis Théodore Géricault Biography | Oil Paintings

9- 26-1791Rouen, FRA - 1-26-1824 Paris, FRA

Jean Louis Théodore Géricault studied under Carl Vernet and Pierre-Narcisse Guerin, although he was frequently at odds with the latter because of his passion for Rubens and his unconventional approach to interpreting nature

Jean Louis Théodore Géricault soon left the classroom, choosing to study at the Louvre, where from 1810 to 1815 he reproduced paintings by Rubens, Titian, Velázquez, and Rembrandt.The years he spent painting at the Louvre, he found he was able to grow and develop artistically in a way he could not in the school of Neoclassicism.

The Patriotic Fervor of Romanticism and Gericault.

Jean Louis Théodore Géricault made his debut at the Salon of 1812 with his spirited portrait of a cavalry officer on horseback The Charging Chasseur and followed this with The Wounded Cuirassier in 1814, subjects which were immensely popular at the height of the Napoleonic Empire. During the Hundred Days, he served as a volunteer in a Royalist regiment, witnessing soldiers and horses at close quarters. He traveled and studied in Italy from 1816-19, and on his return to Paris embarked on the large-scale works which established his reputation as one of the leading French Romantics.

In the 1820's he painted a series of portraits of the mentally ill, he captures the dark looks, glazed eyes and vague expressions, giving a disillusioned view of their marginalized and lonely condition. The monomaniacs are a metaphor of the ordinary individual who is a prisoner of his own vices.

Gericault, the Exotic Perfumes of Romanticism.

Positively his most aggressive and ambitious work, is The Raft of the Medusa, which portrayed the aftermath of a contemporary French shipwreck, Meduse, in 1816, sank off the coast of West Africa, in which the ship's captain had left the crew and passengers to die, 150 people crowded onto a miserable raft for days and days at sea in terrible conditions. In the end, only 15 survived. Struck by this dramatic event, which could also be seen as a metaphor for Napoleon's ruinous fall, Gericault executed this large and powerful painting. The painting's notoriety stemmed from its indictment of a corrupt establishment. It surely excited the imagination of the young Eugène Delacroix, who posed for one of the dying figures. The painting ignited political controversy when first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1819; it then traveled to England in 1820, accompanied by Géricault himself, where it received much praise.

For an artist renowned for his equestrian subjects it is ironic that he died as a result of a fall from his horse. Although he died young, Jean Louis Théodore Géricault was one of the pioneers of the Romantic movement.